IBM is offering $27 a share for the Neteeza and hopes that the smaller company would help with its growing business analytics. Over the past four years, IBM has invested more than $12 billion in 23 analytics related acquisitions.

Making sense of the data is viewed as a big opportunity, something Netezza understood very well. In this second quarter of 2010, Netezza saw its sales jump 45 percent year-over-year. Netezza has more than 350 clients across a variety of industries have adopted Netezza, including eHarmony.

With IBM’s backing, Netezza becomes a much more fearsome competitor. From my perspective, this is actually a great move by IBM and this will put additional pressure on two companies – Teradata and Oracle.